A description of a meeting with a pathocrat:
“An important event for me in those years was my meeting with the chief of security of the dictatorship, the most hated man after Odria himself. I was then a delegate of the University Federation of San Marcos. There were many students in jail and we knew that they were sleeping on prison floors, with no mattresses or blankets. We organized a collection and bought blankets. But when we wanted to take them to the Penitentiary – the prison that was on the site now occupied by the Sheraton Hotel where, so the story goes, the souls of the victims tortured in the old dungeons still wander 'in torment' – we were told only the Ministry of the Interior, Don Alejandro Esparza Zañartu, could authorize the delivery. The Federation agreed that five delegates should ask for a meeting. I was one of the five.
I still remember very vividly the impression it made on me when I saw the feared character close up, in his office in the Interior Ministry. He was a small man of about fifty, wrinkled and bored, who seemed to be looking at us through water and did not listen to a word we said. He let us speak – we were trembling – and when we finished, he kept looking at us without saying anything, as if he was laughing at our confusion. Then he opened a drawer in his desk and took out some copies of Cahuide, a mimeographed little journal which we published clandestinely and in which, of course, we attacked him. 'I know which of you has written each of these articles,' he told us, 'where you meet to print it, and what you plot in your cell meetings.' And, indeed, he did seem omniscient, but, at the same time, deplorable, a pitiful mediocrity. He spoke in an ungrammatical way and his intellectual poverty was quite apparent. Seeing him in this interview, I had an idea for a novel that I would write fifteen years later: Conversations in the Cathedral. In it, I tried to describe the effects that a dictatorship like the eight-year period of Odria had on people's daily lives – their studies, work, loves, dreams and ambitions.”
- Mario Vargas Llosa, in the essay “The Country of a Thousand Faces” (1983).
“An important event for me in those years was my meeting with the chief of security of the dictatorship, the most hated man after Odria himself. I was then a delegate of the University Federation of San Marcos. There were many students in jail and we knew that they were sleeping on prison floors, with no mattresses or blankets. We organized a collection and bought blankets. But when we wanted to take them to the Penitentiary – the prison that was on the site now occupied by the Sheraton Hotel where, so the story goes, the souls of the victims tortured in the old dungeons still wander 'in torment' – we were told only the Ministry of the Interior, Don Alejandro Esparza Zañartu, could authorize the delivery. The Federation agreed that five delegates should ask for a meeting. I was one of the five.
I still remember very vividly the impression it made on me when I saw the feared character close up, in his office in the Interior Ministry. He was a small man of about fifty, wrinkled and bored, who seemed to be looking at us through water and did not listen to a word we said. He let us speak – we were trembling – and when we finished, he kept looking at us without saying anything, as if he was laughing at our confusion. Then he opened a drawer in his desk and took out some copies of Cahuide, a mimeographed little journal which we published clandestinely and in which, of course, we attacked him. 'I know which of you has written each of these articles,' he told us, 'where you meet to print it, and what you plot in your cell meetings.' And, indeed, he did seem omniscient, but, at the same time, deplorable, a pitiful mediocrity. He spoke in an ungrammatical way and his intellectual poverty was quite apparent. Seeing him in this interview, I had an idea for a novel that I would write fifteen years later: Conversations in the Cathedral. In it, I tried to describe the effects that a dictatorship like the eight-year period of Odria had on people's daily lives – their studies, work, loves, dreams and ambitions.”
- Mario Vargas Llosa, in the essay “The Country of a Thousand Faces” (1983).
